


Not Having Cared Enough

by syredronning



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Disability, F/M, Gen, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:30:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syredronning/pseuds/syredronning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thinking is all he has left, so that's all he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Having Cared Enough

**Author's Note:**

> For my fellow Pike addict taraljc who pondered why Number One and Phil Boyce don't show up in the episode "Menagerie".
> 
> Thanks for the wonderful beta goes to 6street.
> 
> Originally published September 2009.

He hadn't wanted this to happen, not like this, he keeps thinking. And thinking is the one thing left for him, which makes it also the most hated thing left. He's lost everything else, mobility and the ability to communicate besides the ridiculous _yes_ and _no_ they've managed to retrieve from his blasted brain, in which the neural impulses run amok from the radiation and make all the nifty modern devices fail in a blink.

Even in his doom, he achieved something no one else had.

He hadn't wanted this, but it's entirely possible that he hadn't cared if something happened to him. Which was, looking back, the stupidest idea of his life, because _dying is easy but surviving might be hard_ is a line he pushed into the heads of his command track students for ages. It was supposed to make them refrain from doing what he did, going into a tight situation without caring for the outcome – for his survival.

Just his peculiar luck that he's survived anyway, in the worst way possible.

If she were here now, she'd probably kill him for having been so careless (which would be fine and welcome), but she's not and never will be again. And if she were still alive, he probably wouldn't be here, because then he would've cared to come out of engineering. She'd been his first officer for ages, and his lover ever since the night of her promotion to captain. Yes, he damn well would've cared then, because there would've been something worth living for.

Now he's a brain trapped in a useless Frankenstein body, and she's a memory, a name on a plaque, words of tribute in the memorial ceremony for the Yorktown. No longer a living, breathing body under his fingertips; no longer the brightest person he'd ever worked with. The news of the ship's loss had come in the night just before his accident, a line in the news that hit him unexpectedly, out of the blue. The call from HQ came in an hour later, and they'd delivered their condolences and then apologized for the inconvenience of being late. As if their empty phrases could make anything better.

He'd known depression before; he hadn't been surprised when it crashed down on him that night, keeping him awake and drinking and thinking morose thoughts, wondering if he should've left the 'fleet long ago, gotten the hell out of an organization that had cost him many friends and all of the few relationships he'd managed to have. He'd been drinking alone, because the man who'd been his barkeeper and doctor and the next best thing to _her_ was now star dust like her, a ghostly memory gliding through his room when he raised his glass for a silent toast.

If he had just stepped down right away, there would've been no accident, and he wouldn't have ended up with _thinking that morose shit all the time_.

He still thinks it'd been an accident because he refuses any other explanation. Captain Christopher Pike had never caved in in the face of challenges, and he had not done so on that training cruise. Life was something to fight through and fight for. At least the lives of others. As for his own... it comes back to not having cared enough that day. Now there's nothing left to care because everything's out of his hands but his thoughts, running in circles between the past and the past because there's no future left.

*

He doesn't know yet that his former science officer is on the way, risking his own future to make a difference for him. Doesn't know yet that there'll be something resembling a life, no matter how illusory, waiting for him on Talos IV, with a woman whose appearance will over time change into that of Number One but who will never have that glorious brain, leaving an eternal ache for _something more_ in his heart even when he's no longer able to name the reason.


End file.
